CHAPTER X

THE BRIGHTON ROADS 224

INDEX 253

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

BY SUTTON PALMER

1. Bluebells, Ripley _Frontispiece_

FACING PAGE

2. Godalming--a Bit of the Old Town 9

3. St. Catherine's Chapel, near Guildford 16

4. Windsor Castle from Cooper's Hill, near Egham 25

5. Hampton Court 32

6. From Richmond Hill 41

7. Richmond 48

8. The Meads, Farnham 57

9. Somerset Bridge, near Elstead 64

10. A Hayfield, Wonersh 73

11. Pyrford Church, near Woking 80

12. Water Lane, near East Horsley 89

13. A Corner of Esher Common 96

14. The Village of Betchworth, near Dorking 105

15. A Stream near Shalford 112

16. Vale of Albury, from St. Martha's Hill 121

17. Autumn Weeds, Chilworth 128

18. A Summer's Eve, Milford Common 137

19. Eashing, near Godalming 144

20. Spring Blossoms, near Dorking 153

21. The Vale of Dorking 160

22. Friday Street, on the way to Leith Hill 169

23. Abinger Hammer 176

24. A Wide Stretch, from the Gibbet, Hindhead 185

25. Witley Church 192

26. Woodland Depths, Wotton 201

27. An Old Farm, near Leith Hill 208

28. The Great Pond, Frensham 217

29. The Bourne, Chobham 224

30. Reigate Heath, Evening 233

31. Flanchford Mill 240

32. A Slope of Bluebells, Hascombe 248

[Illustration]

[Illustration:

SKETCH

MAP OF

SURREY

]

SURREY

I

A "HOME" COUNTY

Surrey is but a small county, the latitudes or longitudes of which a

good walker could traverse in a day; but perhaps no other in England can

be found so close packed with scenes of manifold beauty. Among the "Home

Counties," at least, it seems best to answer Mr. P. G. Hamerton's

criterion of a perfect country as "one which, in a day's drive, or half

a day's, gives you an entirely new horizon, so that you may feel in a

different region, and have all the refreshment of a total change of

scene within a few miles of your own house." Its over-the-way neighbour

Middlesex, which Cobbett, in his slap-dash style, puts down as all ugly,

is at least comparatively tame and monotonous; and one must go as far as

Derby or Devon for such boldly "accidented" heights as those from which

Surrey looks over the growth of London.

The county's varied features run from north to south in zones a few

miles broad, whose characteristic beauties not seldom dovetail into each

other with fine effect of contrast. The north border of this "south

land" is the winding Thames, its rich banks rising to wooded eminences

like St. Ann's Hill and St. George's Hill, the swell of Richmond Park,

the Ridgeway of Wimbledon, and those suburban eminences from which the

Crystal Palace shines over Kent. The east side of this zone is masked by

the spread of Greater London, rich and poor; and the west side, too,

becomes more thickly dotted with villages and villas; while to the south

that giant octopus goes on stretching its grimy tentacles over the green

fields turned into "eligible building sites." How far its process of

urbanification will reach, seems to depend on the stability of Britain's

commercial greatness, which again depends, we are told, on the Fiscal

question, if not on circumstances quite beyond our control, such as the

stock still on hand in the national coal-cellar. When that New Zealand

tourist comes to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's, will he find Southwark,

like ancient Croton, fallen to a squalid fever-stricken townlet, or an

American syndicate at work digging up the ruins of Kingston, as Nippur

is now excavated after being forgotten for thousands of years? Babylon

is "become heaps," Nineveh a "dwelling-place for dragons." What prophet,

then, shall assure us that in a yet unbuilt Australian capital, or at

some future transatlantic hub of the universe, fragments of

jerry-builders' brick and specimens of electroplated ware from Tooting

or Woking may not come to be exhibited, even as our museums treasure

Roman tiles and coins dug up in the fields of Surrey! There are

scientific Cassandras who hint how no insurance office can guarantee

that all these millions of smug citizens might not any night be roused

to homeless terror by the shock of an earthquake, like that which ruined

San Francisco.

Meanwhile the greatest city of the world thrives and goes on growing, so

that almost all of Surrey which it does not already cover may be counted

as its home-farm or pleasure-grounds. This generation is hardly moved to

exclaim, as a writer of last century did on Denmark Hill: "The rich

carpet of Nature decked with Flora's choicest flowers, and wafting

perfumes of odoriferous herbs floating on the breezes, expanded and made

my heart replete with joy!" William Black, indeed, found beauty at the

doors of Camberwell; and the heights of Norwood deserve a better fate

than to be covered with villas. But this mass of bold contours is

exceptional so near South London. More often we must be content to get

over a green rim of our scenic nosegay. From the undulating streets and

suburban rows we usually pass on to a plain, presenting market-gardens

and dairy-farms, where the open ground is not required for playing

fields. Private groves and hedgerows make a show of timber; and when

branches are bare, a frequent feature of the scenery will be those

goal-posts which a critically observing foreigner has mistaken for

gallows. Here we are in the first zone of Surrey, a stretch of London

clay and brick earth, broken here and there by patches of gravel and

sand, which, when large enough, are like to be marked out by the hungry

game of golf.

This, where the builder is busiest "making the green one red," may be

called in general the stratum of surface brick, followed southwards by

successive belts of chalk, sand, and clay. Some ten miles bring us to

rising ground, on which cuttings and broken knobs reveal chalk built up

at the bottom of the sea ages before London or Babylon had a name. Here

we reach the second zone, that of the North Downs, a chalk ridge running

roughly straight across the county from Farnham to Tatsfield, near the

eastern border reaching a highest point of about 880 feet. This central

line, broadened to several miles at Croydon, narrowed to a high edge

beyond Guildford, makes Surrey's best-marked feature, its natural

baldness much bewigged by the woods and parks of London's luckier

citizens; and thus adorned, there are those who hold the chalk heights,

with their dry soil and clear air, dearer than the aspects more common

in the next zone.

The steep south faces of the Downs look into the Holmesdale Valley of

greensand and gault, across which, within a rifle-shot, rise a line of

sandy hills whose more rugged and shaggy outlines often form the

loveliest scenes in Surrey, to some tastes, certainly the wildest,

though many corners have been tamed by grounds and gardens among

stretches of bristling common and straggling pine wood. These heights

stand usually lower than the Downs; but at more than one point, as Leith

Hill, they are the most mountainous prominences of the south-eastern

counties. Hants, Sussex, and Surrey meet about Hindhead and its

neighbour Blackdown, next in height to Leith Hill, where an illustrious

settler has famed the view over

Green Sussex fading into blue

With one grey glimpse of sea.

But here a prosaic describer must note how it is only from some point of

vantage, and at some rarely clear hour, that through a gap the sea comes

in view of Surrey hills, since their prospect southwards is usually

bounded by the line of the South Downs, crossing Sussex to end in the

bluff of Beachy Head.

Between stretches the Weald, a strip of which, except in that

south-western corner filled by the broadened sand heights, belongs to

Surrey and makes its southern zone of fresh features. This wide plain

once lay shaded under the great Andredeswald, that was the Black Country

of England before coal and steam came into play, and still earlier it

raised a barrier parting the South Saxons from kindred invaders. Its

_hursts_ and woods hint how the clay soil bore a primæval forest,

notably of oaks, patches of it still preserved in the parks dappling an

expanse of farm land long ago cleared to feed the furnaces that cast

cannon and other iron work, specimens of which may be found in churches

and homes about this district. Less picturesque, on the whole, than the

zones to the north, the Surrey Weald is more remote from metropolitan

sophistication, and keeps perhaps a larger proportion of the old

weathered cottages and moated granges, which æsthetic citizens love to

look on rather than to inhabit. It must be the Weald Fuller has in mind

when he speaks of Surrey's skirts as "rich and fruitful," but its inward

parts "hungry and barren," though these, even in his day, "by reason of

the clear air and clean ways, full of many genteel habitations."

Some brooklets of the Weald run southward to the English Channel, else,

nearly the whole of Surrey drains into the valley of the Thames, a river

to make the landscape fortune of any county. If ever its scenes have a

fault, from the artist's point of view, this may appear to be the

absence of water; yet some of its noblest prospects are where the Mole

and the Wey break through the sand or chalk ridges to reach the river

plain. Surrey has smaller streams less widely known. Ruskin, to deaf

ears, lamented the defilement of the Wandle, its source, its curving

course, and its mouth all now within the limits of Greater London. Do

Putney boys trace to its head the Beverley Brook, as Charles Lamb's

companions tried to play explorer up the New River? How many of the

most schooled Londoners could tell through what parishes and by what

suburban settlements flows the Hogsmill River, or the Bourne, or the

Burway Ditch? A Brixton householder may hear the name of the Ephra

without guessing how its course is below his feet. There are veteran

ramblers in Surrey who know not the Deanoak Brook, nor the Blackwater.

The motorist scorching along the Tillingbourne Valley road comes home

ignorant what beautiful banks he has skirted, while one goggled eye was

all upon his gear, and the other on the look-out for police traps.

The fact is that Surrey has plenty of water, often lost in the

picturesque roughness of its contours. In smoother counties any hillock

may disclose some Ouse or Avon shining miles away, whereas here the

windings and branchings of the Wey and Mole go often unsuspected till

one come close upon them. Below Surrey's bare, bony prominences, its

veins will lie lost in the plumpness of the valleys. Both chalk and sand

hills, dry as their tops may seem, are full of springs, escaping not

only in streams, but into stagnant or slowly trickling pools, that

sometimes form a chain of lakelets, or, as in the case of Virginia

Water, have

[Illustration: GODALMING--A BIT OF THE OLD TOWN.]

been improved into trim sheets to leave no note wanting in the landscape

scale. Even within the wider bounds of London sparkles a lake like that

of Wimbledon Park, where in hard winters ice is coined into silver.

Sandy commons, as well as marshy bogs, are unexpectedly found dotted

with ponds, often beautifully hidden behind a curtain of foliage, as the

"Silent Pool" of Albury, invisible to the cyclist spinning by within a

hundred yards. The modest titles of some of these Surrey lakes may well

deceive a stranger who has not opened his eyes upon the "Waggoners'

Wells" of Hindhead or the "Ponds" of Frensham. On the south side of the

county, where they once lay among thick woods, such waters often

preserve the title of "Hammer Ponds," from the days when they were

dammed up to work iron forges.

Surrey's character for variety is carried out by the way in which green

openings and barren scrubs are mixed up with the elaborate works of man.

Who shall say where London begins or ends? If we think to get clear of

it at Wandsworth, we find it breaking out again at Wimbledon. The

country lad tramping up to those streets paved with gold, may meet them

at Mitcham, and a little farther on lose himself on Figgs Marsh. The

widest definition of Great London is the Metropolitan Police District,

taking in all parishes fifteen miles from Charing Cross, the Postal

District being a little more restricted. But still, beyond these bounds,

we come upon settlements of citizens making their homes an hour's

journey from the smoke and din of their work-place. Favourite sites for

such colonies are the edges of commons so frequent on the south side of

London, in Surrey to be counted by hundreds, open woodlands, stretches

of copse and heath, well-worn playgrounds, down to the patches of green

that seldom fail to grace the smallest hamlet. Several of these public

pleasure-grounds run into London, where the south-western resident can

make a round over Clapham, Wandsworth, Putney, Wimbledon, Mitcham,

Tooting, Tooting Bec and Streatham Commons, with tramways or 'buses to

bridge him from one open space to another. It is on the farther side of

the county, of course, that we must look for the widest and wildest

expanses of ground, not waste so long as it serves to keep jaded

citizens in touch with the charms of untamed nature; yet even here begin

to gather the shadows of villadom, and the haunts of vipers are dug out

for tram-lines through brick and stucco avenues.

Of Surrey's population, over two millions, the greater part is

concentrated on some fifty of the 755 square miles that make its

measurement. In this county lie half a dozen of the metropolitan

boroughs, to which may be tacked on Croydon, Richmond, and Kingston, and

many a village promoted to be a "choice residential suburb." The last

census notes a slight decrease in what it terms the outer belt of

suburbs; but that seems to mean only a shifting farther into the

country, as trains and trams bring a wider circle within the area where

the builder can claim fresh nooks as "ripe for development." The once

rustic "box" of the early Victorian citizen is apt to have come down in

the world. Perhaps nine-tenths of my readers may look blank when

reminded how Mr. Quirk's "Alibi House" was at Camberwell, and Mr.

Tagrag's "Satin Lodge" at Clapham; yet surely they are aware of the

miniature Walworth Castle, in which Mr. Wemmick kept an aged parent.

"Lovell the Widower's" home at Putney, and the palatial Roehampton

villas of Thackeray's city magnates may still stand high in house

agents' books. But in ex-suburbs, as a rule, such pleasure-houses of a

former generation are in no demand now, their sites often covered by

shabby streets, shops, or blocks of flats; while leagues farther out,

at Purley, Tadworth, or Claygate, spring up a fresh crop of smartly

painted villas, in lines or knots, with white walls, red roofs, green

water-butts and "modern conveniences," to tempt Londoners who can afford

fresh air for living in. Every year some new village or hamlet is

strangled in the arms of the monster that has yearly been adding a score

of miles to its myriad streets, and taking in new inhabitants enough to

people a town. Yet Surrey has the surprising feature of a deserted

village, and that on the very edge of the county of London. Fitly named

Lonesome, it stands close to Streatham, a few minutes' walk from more

than one railway station. The builder is so busy hereabouts, that for

all I know it may have been broken up before this page gets into print;

but for a generation it has stood uninhabited, with cracked walls and

smashed windows, an unlovely ruin, making a monument of some story in

which an obstinate landlord, a disagreeable industry, or a disastrous

enterprise are vaguely mixed up in my memory.

The old towns of Surrey have more or less undergone the same change as

the metropolitan outskirts, some almost lost in the "Wen," as Cobbett

loved to call it, some making a nucleus for a sort of remote suburb,

much affected by the "dead weight" fund-holders and stock-jobbers so

loudly denounced by that obstreperous patriot. The villages, too, are a

conglomeration of old and new about their ancient or spick-and-spanly

rebuilt churches, and their straggling greens, kept in time-honoured

sanctuary from the weapons of the jerry-builder. The whole county

betrays its metropolitan dependence in the many trim enclosures around

modern mansions and villas, among which holds up its head here and there

some lordly old hall like Sutton or Loseley, some once strong castle

like those of Guildford or Farnham. There are not a few ivied

manor-houses still standing; some fallen to the estate of farm-houses,

some restored or enlarged to be choice residences for new owners. A

weather-beaten cottage of gentility will command a fancy price, so long

as it be not too near the madding crowd, nor yet too far from means of

soon mingling with the same. Then Surrey is famed for those real

cottages, "sacred to the poor," that may appear in the very heart of

some smug, commonplace suburb, but more often in out-of-the-way nooks,

where nature better blends with their timbered and gabled quaintness,

"each a nest in bloom," thatched, tiled, time-stained, patched,

top-heavy, leaning-to as if ripe to tumble among a bed of flowers--

One that, summer-blanch'd,

Was parcel-bearded with the traveller's-joy

In Autumn, parcel ivy-clad; and here

The warm-blue breathings of a hidden hearth

Broke from a bower of vine and honeysuckle:

One look'd all rose-tree, and another wore

A close-set robe of jasmine sown with stars:

This had a rosy sea of gillyflowers

About it; this, a milky way on earth,

Like visions in the Northern dreamer's heavens,

A lily-avenue climbing to the doors;

One, almost to the martin-haunted eaves

A summer burial deep in hollyhocks:

Each its own charm.

With such modestly hidden charms are contrasted a rank growth of

conspicuous Institutions--schools, orphanages, "homes," asylums,

barracks, prisons and the like, thick set in certain spots, as about

Sutton or Caterham. Some of these have been able to adapt stately old

mansions to their use, as at Beddington and Roehampton; but more often

they are modern, ungraceful, appalling, usurping, dominating landscapes

thrown away on criminals or lunatics. It seems an ominous sign of the

times that as often as one sees a new pile rising on Surrey heights, it

is apt to turn out a lunatic asylum, for which the flats about Hanwell

surely offer a fitter site. The most showy of such structures are the

far seen Holloway College above Egham, and the Sanatorium for the insane

in the valley below, which cost over a million, made out of the profits

of notorious patent medicines, to be given back thus to the public by a

benefactor who here showed himself a posthumous humorist in bricks and

mortar. Or was his will made in some mood of repentance, such as led

mediæval cut-throats to endow churches and chantries? His College, for

which _olet_ would make an appropriate motto, is devoted to the higher

education of women, that they may teach their children to put no faith

in quackery, even when disguised under the American euphemism of

"proprietary articles."

Had I had the ear of such a pious founder, I would have counselled him

to leave part of his ill-got gains as a fund for prosecuting,

pillorying, pelting, daubing with hatred and ridicule, whipping at the

cart's tail of public opinion, transporting to some Malebolge, foul with

their own concoctions, those unspeakable humbugs, who, not content with

the lower-class religious papers as an area to be defiled by their lying

advertisements, impudently deface the fair scenes of Surrey with

loathsome placards of this and that mischievous or worthless nostrum, to

sicken the considerate passer-by at the thought of popular ignorance and

credulity so easily preyed upon. Some day this mean offence may be

repressed by law. Might we not begin by restricting the pill-and

potion-mongers to Hackney Marsh or Barking Level as a sink for their

shameless besliming? There is no spot in Surrey, not even the New Cut,

Lambeth, nor the Sewage Farm of Croydon, that deserves such pollution.

The endowment above invited may be vested in a body bearing the mystic

device S. C. A. P. A., a league of champions sworn to slay this hideous

Jabberwock, which one should not fear to mention by its legion names,

for the last thing such an impostor dare do is to look twelve honest men

in the face and have wrung out of him the composition of his panacea,

swallowed so trustfully by the fools who enrich knaves.

Staringly mendacious advertisements are not the only scandal to raise

the gorge of a poor but honest wayfarer on Surrey's countless roads,

alive with all kinds of travel, from farm-waggons to cycles, from

four-horse coaches to tramps. At their London ends, the highways are cut

up by

[Illustration: ST. CATHERINE'S CHAPEL, NEAR GUILDFORD.]

tram-lines, which threaten to go far, unless this locomotive growth be

nipped by the blast of motor cars. The invasion of the motor is still a

sore subject along once quieter roadsides of Surrey. How Cobbett would

have blustered if, on some rural ride, he had fallen in with a modern

"dead weight" hurrying out of the "Wen" at full career, on his 60 h.-p.

Mercedes, a flashy show of paint and furs! But one need not have any

special spite against the "jews and jobbers" who were his _bêtes noirs_,

to be choked by indignation in the fog of dust and smoke through which

one catches a hasty glimpse of bugbears in armour, masked and bandaged,

like the uncanny monstrosities of Mr. Wells' stories. It is all very

well to remember how railways, too, were banned by prejudice, so that

some half-century ago a liberal-minded John Bull, like the chronicler of

Jorrocks and Soapey Sponge, still undertakes to apologise for those

novelties on the score of their useful service to country life. But

trains do not drive people off the roads and out of snug homes that lie

too near the dusty triumph of Goth and Vandal chariots, "rigged with

curses dark." Far more terrible are such swift Juggernauts than the

insidious speed of the cyclist, who has lived down his reproach as a

"cad on castors," being indeed kept considerate by the chance of getting

the worst of it in case of collision with man or beast, whereas there

can be no standing against the weighty momentum of those Bulls of

Bashan, "hazing and mazing the blessed _roads_ with the devil's own

team"--nay, the very fields, into which they scatter grit over

strawberry beds and haycocks as well as hedgerows. And what one grudges

most in the mad speed of the motorist is that, while he makes a moving

blot on the landscape, his goggles can snatch but dim joy from prospects

through which he is borne in such a whirl of excitement past one lunatic

asylum to another.

Sportive sons of this tribe of Jehu have the enjoyment of an automobile

race track laid down at Brooklands, near Weybridge, a sort of mechanical

Epsom or Newmarket, and there has even been talk of a motor road all the

way to Brighton. Did they never cast an eye on the miles of useless

tunnels at Welbeck, which their present owner might be glad to have

turned to some good purpose? There they could pant and fizz up and down

at their own pace all day and night long in an exhilarating gleam of

electric light, and smudge no fair scene flung away on their rushing

course. These machines are signs of the times, when, as Horace said--or

something to this effect--in days that were not so high-geared:--

Too bold we grow, too fast we go;

Too many things we want to know,

Too many sights to see;

'Tis not enough o'er earth to fly;

Man strives to scale the very sky

On L.S. piled on D.

But let the humble pedestrian take heart when overshadowed by the proud

passage of Sir Gorgius Midas. His car prevails on the highways, but on

the byways it is helpless, all the more if the weight of its armour be

five thousand shekels of brass. And Surrey abounds in byways, some still

twisting through the outer streets of London, their original character

to be guessed only by such titles as _Coldharbour Lane_, _Cut-throat

Lane_, which perhaps was "Cut-through Lane" in its blossoming days, and

the _Worple Roads_ and _Worple Ways_ of Richmond, Wimbledon, and

Mortlake, whose villa-dwellers may be ignorant that these names denote

old bridle-paths.

Country-folk or towns-folk, we are not always fully aware of our own

blessings. Let not familiarity breed contempt for what strikes a

stranger as one of the pleasantest traits in an English landscape.

Nathaniel Hawthorne is not the only American who, in visiting _Our Old

Home_, has taken admiring note how:--

The high-roads are made pleasant to the traveller by a border of

trees, and often afford him the hospitality of a wayside bench

beneath a comfortable shade. But a fresher delight is to be found

in the footpaths, which go wandering away from stile to stile,

along hedges, and across broad fields, and through wooded parks,

leading you to little hamlets of thatched cottages, ancient,

solitary farm-houses, picturesque old mills, streamlets, pools, and

all those quiet, secret, unexpected yet strangely familiar features

of English scenery that Tennyson shows us in his idylls and

eclogues. These by-paths admit the wayfarer into the very heart of

rural life, and yet do not burden him with a sense of

intrusiveness. He has a right to go whithersoever they lead him;

for, with all their shaded privacy, they are as much the property

of the public as the dusty high-road itself, and even by an older

tenure. Their antiquity probably exceeds that of the Roman ways;

the footsteps of the aboriginal Britons first wore away the grass,

and the natural flow of intercourse between village and village has

kept the track bare ever since. An American farmer would plough

across any such path and obliterate it with his drills of potatoes

and Indian corn; but here it is protected by law, and still more by

the sacredness that inevitably springs up in this soil along the

well-defined footpaths of centuries. Old associations are sure to

be fragrant herbs in English nostrils; we pull them up as weeds.

Surrey is seamed with such immemorial rights of way, some, indeed, lost,

stolen, or strayed into more formal roads; but County Councils and the

like are now vigilant against private usurpation of their charms. On the

edge of the noisy town, and all over the quiet countryside, they may be

found and followed, sometimes for miles, every kind of them, straight

field-cuts, blooming hedgerow paths, hard-beaten tow-paths, green

ridges, leafy archways, trim woodland avenues "for whispering lovers

made," free passages over lordly demesnes, straggling tracks across

rough heaths, half-choked smugglers' lanes, and old historic roads, here

improved into a busy turnpike, there run wild as a grassy sward or

shrunk to a doubtful footway, all open to lovers of virtue, who are

quiet, and go _a-walking_, as a modern Izaak Walton might choose, now

that the waters of the Mole and the Wandle are strictly preserved. Let

other-minded excursionists stay in Middlesex.

II

THE RIVERSIDE

Surrey's crooked northern border is washed by the Thames, "great father

of the British floods," to whom so many compliments, vows, and addresses

have been offered in prose and verse:--

O could I flow like thee, and make thy stream

My great example, as it is my theme!

Though deep, yet clear; though gentle, yet not dull;

Strong without rage, without o'erflowing full!

These lines, in which let no writer scorn to join chorus of quotation,

are from Denham's _Cooper's Hill_, a title supplied by the "airy

mountain" that raises its "proud head"--to a poetic height of 200 feet

and more--upon the north-western corner of Surrey. Descending the river

from Windsor, after passing Old Windsor Church, we enter this county

beyond the "Bells of Ouseley," to find the right bank edged by what

plain prose must belittle as a wooded rise, on whose top, pleasant

rather than proud, stands a stately mansion that, in the course of its

chequered history, grew into a banyan grove of buildings built in vain.

Cooper's Hill was in Victorian times the property of one of those

meteoric financiers flashing across the sky of British commerce, the

same who in London built for himself a house so large that no one ever

lived in it. Then the place made itself a new name as a college for the

Indian engineering service; but this institution came to be uprooted,

and its halls passed into private occupation, after for a time standing

desolate, as those of Ossian's Balclutha, while there was question what

to do with them. An academy for horse-marines, a week-end club for

members of Parliament, a training-school for county councillors, are

suggestions that could be made; but, to my mind, a truly Liberal

Government might have endowed Cooper's Hill as an asylum for minor

poets.

This first though not foremost of Surrey heights is surrounded by fair

and famous scenes to inspire the Denhams of our generation. Below it, on

the Berkshire edge, lies Beaumont, once home of Warren Hastings, now a

Roman Catholic Eton. Behind it opens Englefield Green, a village of much

gentility, which has housed many well-known persons, from Louis

Napoleon to the late R. H. Hutton of the _Spectator_; and it is clearly

the "Dinglefield" of Mrs. Oliphant's _Neighbours on the Green_. Near

this, at the Bishops Gate of Windsor Park, is the hamlet where Shelley

wrote his _Alastor_, and did not let his views of Church or State be

charmed by the sight of Windsor Castle that here rises royally into

prospect. Windsor Park is mainly in Berkshire; yet, keeping down the

woods and rhododendron walks on the east side, we should come upon

Virginia Water, overflowing at one end into Surrey, which may claim a

share of the royal demesne, and a large one of the wider bounds once

known as Windsor Forest.

From the Thames slope of Cooper's Hill, where "Denham's Seat" makes a

view-point across the river, expands a wider landscape over the flat

fields of Bucks and Middlesex, watered by the branching Colne. The spire

to the north marks a village known on maps as Wyrardisbury, but to men

as Wraysbury; then a mile beyond, across the railway, comes Horton, home

of Milton's youth. But the scene of greatest fame lies in the

foreground, at our feet, for this wide riverside meadow, degraded to a

race-course as it has been, is Runnymede, on which King John was forced

to sign the first great charter

[Illustration: WINDSOR CASTLE FROM COOPER'S HILL, NEAR EGHAM.]

of our liberties. Some would have that historic stage to be Magna Charta

island off the west end of the mede, where a stone is shown as the table

of signing; but no Surrey patriot can allow such a pretension on the

part of Buckinghamshire, while it may be that the king had his quarters

at the Benedictine Nunnery of Ankerwyke on the other bank, if not at the

old house in Staines pretending to that honour. It is remarkable what a

number of places in many parts of England claim to have housed or lodged

a so unpopular and worthless sovereign.

Above Runnymede, dropping off the ridge of Cooper's Hill, one may come

down to the pleasant town of Egham, its one long street lying a mile

back from the river; but its accretions straggle on towards the bank,

where the tow-path leads by havens of boating men and "Anglers' Rests"

to the bridge of Staines. This is a Middlesex town, the older part of it

also lying back from the Thames, upon the Colne, whose damp flats form a

somewhat dreary background, not enlivened by the banks of a huge

reservoir for thirsty London. But Staines has a name on the Thames

through its ancient stone, marking the limit of London City's

jurisdiction, thirty-six miles up the river. There may be Londoners who

never heard of this stone, which made the goal of a Lord Mayor's

progress eighty years ago, to be celebrated by his Lordship's chaplain

in a most amusing style, by no means meant to be amusing. Having spared

the reader Akenside's inscription for the column on Runnymede, I have

half a mind to inflict upon him some account of this expedition, as

raised to all the dignity of history, and all the interest of

exploration, in the reverend gentleman's now rare volume. But it might

seem too like ancient history to a generation of impatient readers, who

know the Lord Mayor's State barge only from the heading of their

_Illustrated London News_, and perhaps do not know how the Corporation's

Admiralship has passed into the farther reaching hands of the Thames

Conservancy. "Suffice it, therefore, to say that though the party were

three successive days--two of which included fifteen hours--upon the

water; yet, such was the fine and ever-varying nature of the home

scenery around them, which was itself sufficient to engross the

attention, as the Thames made its azure sweeps round slopes of meadow

land; so diversified were the occupations of reading, working, and

conversation--conversation which, always easy and intelligent, was often

such as to discover memories containing ample registers of

miscellaneous snatches and fragments of sentiments, both in prose and

verse, which were sometimes applied with considerable tact and address

to passing scenes; so well and interestingly, in short, were the several

successive hours filled up"--that one must break off the chronicler's

long-winded sentence with his own admission, that "it would be difficult

and tedious to detail all the particulars" of that civic voyage.

I do not aspire to emulate this author's stilted gait on the trip from

Staines to London, but I invite the reader to plod with me along the

tow-path; that, as he is aware, will pass from one side to another, a

matter hardly understood by an observant American writer, who made note

how "one shore of the Thames, sometimes the right, sometimes the left,

it seems, belongs to the public." From the Bells of Ouseley to Staines

Bridge the tow-path has been in Surrey; now it crosses to the pleasant

river front of the town, the Surrey side being blocked by private

paradises and boating-houses. To Chertsey, the next Surrey town, we

might, indeed, cut across by a road that at one point comes close to the

river; but the more inviting way is the path on the Middlesex bank, and

at one of the locks we may have the luck to catch a steamboat plying in

summer between Kingston and Oxford on a river, of which that old poet

might say more emphatically in our generation:--

Though with those streams, he no resemblance hold,

Whose foam is amber and their gravel gold;

His genuine and less guilty wealth to explore,

Search not his bottom, but survey his shore.

The riches of the shore here are chiefly in trim gardens and flat

fields, by which the tow-path leads windingly, yet spares us Father

Thames' most wayward aberration, the mile-long loop of Penton-Hook,

across the mouth of which we cut by the lock in a couple of minutes.

Before reaching this from Staines, is passed on the opposite bank a

surprising collection of bungalows, shanties, and tents, one of those

settlements of genteel gipseying that have grown up on the banks in our

time. Beyond the lock, we come to the Middlesex village of Laleham, in

whose churchyard lies Matthew Arnold, born here in his father's

pre-Rugby days. Below this leafy place, beginning to be overlaid by

builders' plans, road and tow-path run together beside Laleham Park

towards Chertsey Bridge, the Surrey bank being fringed by willow copses,

much sought for floating flirtations and picnic teas. But to reach the

older part of Chertsey, one had better cross by the ferry at Laleham,

and take a mile of straight hedgerow path over the Abbey Mead, passing a

crumbling fragment, all that now represents what was once the richest of

Surrey's monasteries, as it was the first founded in the county by St.

Augustine.

Nowadays there is not much air of ecclesiastical dignity about Chertsey,

rather of quiet prosperity in the long thoroughfare that crooks itself

nearly two miles from the station to the bridge, connecting the new

quarters that have sprung up at either end. The lion of this straggling

town is the house on the right side of the way up to the station, marked

by a tablet recording how "here the last accents flowed from Cowley's

tongue"; but such a relic has gone down in value since the days when

Abraham Cowley ranked among the first flight of British poets. A name

more familiar to this generation is that of Charles James Fox, who had

his country retreat at St. Ann's Hill. Another notable neighbour of

Chertsey was Thomas Day, author of _Sandford and Merton_. About three

miles behind the town, past Botley's Park, Potter's Park, and Ottershaw,

the now rich woods of Anningsley make a monument to that earnest

philanthropist, who fixed his home here on poor sandy land that he

might give employment in improving it by plantations. His death came

about through too consistent carrying out of his principle that animals

can always be managed by kindness; he was killed by being thrown from an

unbroken colt; then the wife whom he had chosen with so much

scrupulosity, after pupils trained for that post had failed to pass his

examination of trying ordeals, showed herself a worthy helpmeet by

spending the rest of her life in heart-broken seclusion.

Pleasant walks may be taken by those parks to the Basingstoke Canal and

the valley of the Wey, a few miles behind Chertsey. But no one who has

an hour to spare here should miss the ascent of St. Ann's Hill, which

lies a short mile to the west on the road leading out near the railway

station. The grounds, with their grotto, "Temple to Friendship" and such

like, are of course private; but at the "Golden Grove," notable by a

tree bearing up a platform in front, one can turn off the road for a

public path leading over the hill. Though only about 200 feet high, this

richly-wooded eminence looks far over the Thames valley; and through the

foliage at the top vistas have been cut framing such prominent landmarks

as Windsor Castle, the Holloway College, Harrow-on-the-Hill, Richmond

Hill, the Crystal Palace, and the Great Wheel at Earl's Court, till it

had ceased to obtrude itself on so many points of view to the west of

London. There are traces of an old encampment that gave this hill the

forgotten name of Aldbury; and hidden among the trees is a "Nun's Well,"

from which perhaps it was re-christened after a now vanished chapel of

St. Ann.

A couple of miles above Chertsey, between the Thames and the big village

of Addlestone, swells up Woburn Park, its grounds once celebrated as a

_ferme ornée_, but now a nursery of the young idea, where

prospect-hunters are out of bounds. Round it one may take a pleasant

path from Chertsey Bridge, leading over the green level of Chertsey

Mead, and curving into the Weybridge Road, where it crosses a Bourne not

far from the canalised course of the Wey. This path cuts off the bends

of the Thames tow-path, which as far as Weybridge keeps the Middlesex

bank. But if one were going from Chertsey Bridge to Walton Bridge, more

than half the distance is saved by taking the fairly straight road

through Shepperton in Middlesex. Travellers on wheels are willing to

give a wide berth to the Thames bendings, cyclists indeed being warned

off the tow-path; and the modern Great Western Road, like the old Roman

way to Silchester, does not touch Surrey till the bridge at Staines has

been crossed.

Thus Weybridge, lying off direct roads, entangled between the Thames and

the Wey, seems not so well known as it deserves to be. Richmond

excepted, I declare this the pleasantest riverside town in Surrey. It

stretches roomily from the river to the railway, with one end in the

lush meadowland of the Thames valley, and the other rising on the heath

and pine-wood scenery so characteristic of West Surrey. I once met a

honeymoon couple from the North who were pining among the tame richness

of England, but their spirits revived at the "Hand and Spear," near

Weybridge station, which I prescribed as a tonic in their case. Here,

behind the railway, begins the wooded ridge of St. George's Hill, the

top of which was an ancient camp, and one of Cæsar's supposed stations

in Surrey. Nearly the whole of this long height is a private enclosure,

but it has been liberally set open to ramblers who will do no mischief.

In a central glade among the pine woods is even provided a Swiss Châlet

for refreshments; then a little south of this, where

[Illustration: Hampton Court.]

the ridge makes a sudden drop, opens a clear and wide view to the Downs.

The southern gate of the park lets one out on a road between Byfleet and

Cobham; and the winding tracks through the woods lead down on either

side to varied scenes, on the west the mazes of the Wey, straightened

out by its canalised arm, on the east an expanse of common and fir woods

falling to the alluvial bed of the Mole.

It is no wonder, then, that many Londoners--too many, says the last

comer--have built themselves villas on the dry upper slopes of Wey

bridge, while the older part of the town on the river bank is better

known to transient visitors of aquatic tastes. A link between the two

quarters is the spire rising near the bridge over the Wey to mark the

oldest part of all. The rebuilt church contains a tomb by Chantrey for

the Duchess of York, whose residence at Oatlands is also commemorated by

a pillar on the Green, a second-hand monument that once ornamented the

Seven Dials of St. Giles. Another royalty, Louis Philippe, for a time

found sepulchre in the Roman Catholic chapel here, till the bones of

this exiled family might be removed to their native land.

Oatlands Park borders Wey bridge on the east. If the general reader be

surprised that Drayton, in his account of what Milton styles

"Royal-towered Thames" couples Oatlands with Hampton Court and Richmond,

that is because readers with so much to read forget how this, too, has

been a palace, which made one stage of King Charles's long journey to

the scaffold; and his youngest son, as born here, was Henry of Oatlands.

In the park stood two yew trees, some hundreds of yards apart, between

which legend draws its long bow in measuring by them a feat of Queen

Bess's archery. The mansion is now an hotel; and the grounds have been

encroached on for building plots. A century ago it belonged to George

IV.'s military brother, that Duke of York whom Charles Greville, in his

critical way, calls the only one of the royal princes bearing the

character of an English gentleman; and he touches on the Duchess's

extraordinary love of dogs, parrots, and monkeys. The graves of her

hundred pets still ornament the park, which has also to show such a

costly grotto as was dear to Georgian "improvers." Another feature of

these grounds is the Broadwater Lake, representing a former course of

the Thames. The tongue of land beyond was once Middlesex, but by

alteration of the channel has been thrown into Surrey.

To this side the tow-path crosses at Weybridge, and one can double the

distance to Walton by following the bends of the river opposite

Shepperton and Halliford. Near Walton Bridge is reached a scene of

historic note, for Cowey Stakes here has been taken to be the ford by

which Cæsar crossed the Thames on his pursuit of Cassivelaunus. What

will be more obvious to the wayfarer is a very modern encampment of

tents, with other shelters and conveniences, including a floating bath,

which has sprung up of late years near the Middlesex end of Walton

Bridge. The town of Walton-on-Thames stands mainly back from the river,

its station being a mile behind. It has no such wild background as St.

George's Hill, but lies pleasantly mixed up with groves and parks, and

seems a snug place of retreat for quiet-minded Londoners. Walton Church

was the scene of Elizabeth's cautiously Anglican view of the

Sacrament:--

Christ was the Word who spake it,

He took the bread and brake it;

And what that Word did make it

That I believe, and take it.

This church boasts the tomb of Lilly the astrologer, and monuments by

Chantrey and Roubiliac; then near it is to be seen the house of the

regicide Bradshaw, now split up into cottages. In the churchyard is

buried "bright, broken Maginn," Thackeray's "Captain Shandon," who set

so many tables in a roar.

But the literary and historic memories of such places may not much

concern those who have come out for a day on the river. Each of these

Thames-side towns is a haven for escaped Londoners, often familiar with

little more of them than the boat-houses on their banks, and the inns,

some of which seem too eager to make their hay while the sun shines.

Each has its fleet of boats, moored thickly together in whole rafts, its

clubs, and its annual gala day of the local regatta. On a fine Sunday or

Saturday afternoon every lock is packed with youth and beauty, set off

by gay colours and airy costumes. Every reach within railway ride of

London may be found lively with a jumble of craft of all sorts, from

Canadian canoes to Venetian gondolas, tiny yachts, skiffs, tubs,

outriggers, punts, ferry-boats, eights, fours, "dongolas," "randans,"

pairs, rowed, poled, tugged, towed, or idly moored, like the big

house-boats whose cramped luxury gives a lazy refuge from cares and

taxes. Among all these the barges of business move like surly and

clumsy tyrants; and water-scorching machines sweep through the fluttered

crowd as wolves in a sheepfold. Steamers and motor-launches have

replaced the State barges in which Lord Mayors and such-like used to

progress in the days when to be a "jolly young waterman" was more of a

trade than a pleasure.

Those flights upon the banks of Thames,

That so did take Eliza and our James--

were winged by mercenary arms. It seems well that the golden or gilded

youth of our generation are more active, taking their amusement _moult

tristement_, as might be judged by an unsympathetic foreigner. An

English writer has found fault with Thames boats as "built for woman and

not for man, for lovely woman to recline, parasol in one hand and tiller

ropes in the other, while man--inferior man--pulled and pulled and

pulled as an ox yoked to the plough." But that is hardly fair now that

girls boyishly take their turn at the oar, even exhibiting the spectacle

of whole galleys deftly womanned by crews of water-Amazons. The only

right left to man here is the panting and perspiring toil of the

tow-path, to which he bends devotedly like "the captives depicted on

Egyptian monuments with cords about their necks." Such slavery may well

be preferred to the aid of those exorbitant and foul-mouthed hirelings

who infest the river banks in search of a job, which to Edwin makes a

labour of love, so Angelina be drawn along cool, at ease, grateful, and

admiring. With his dynamic energy, contrast the contemplative, perhaps

misanthropic, and apparently celibate joys of the angler, throned upon

his punt or posted on the bank, as he has been ever since Pope's day--

The patient fisher takes his silent stand,

Intent, his angle trembling in his hand:

With looks unmoved, he hopes the scaly breed,

And eyes the dancing cork, and bending reed.

Below Walton, the Thames winds quietly on between banks that again

suggest a quotation from Denham--

No stupendous precipice denies

Access, no horror turns away our eyes.

The panorama is one of green meadows, garden grounds, shady islands,

cuts and creeks, Sunbury Lock, boat-houses, inns, water-works,

racecourse enclosures, and hints of villages lying back from the river;

but Hampton Church stands out on the bank; then a string of islets

brings us on to the mouth of the Mole opposite Hampton Court. This

palace of popular resort, with its galleries, courts, gardens, and park

avenues, its barracks, its many houses of entertainment, and its

terminus of London tramways, is in Middlesex; but its station is across

the bridge in Surrey; and if one wanted matter to fill a few pages, one

might fairly include a description of its treasures. But so much has to

be said of the Surrey side, that we had better pass on with one look at

this monument of old England, touched with graces of continental taste.

The tow-path, that has been in Surrey since we left Weybridge, again

crosses to pass with princely breadth under the wall of Hampton Park.

But on the Surrey side also, we are not kept far from the river, for,

after a diversion through Molesey, the road comes to the bank by the old

church of Thames Ditton; then, through the outskirts of Long Ditton, it

joins the much-wheeled Ripley road, which in front of Surbiton becomes a

waterside esplanade beseeming that most respectable London colony that

has the name of being affected by west-end tradesmen and the like "warm"

citizens. Such, at least, is the reproach brought against it by

satirical scribblers, who perhaps live at Peckham or Camden Town,

envious at heart of Surbiton's social amenities as described in the

instructive life of "Mr. Bailey Martin." Another novelist suggests how

Surbiton wants nothing but a pier to look like a seaside resort, with

its parade, bandstand, and so forth, along which, by two miles of

houses, we come into the ancient borough of Kingston, that makes a core

for so much villadom.

As an independent town, this, with its excrescences, Surbiton, Norbiton,

Malden, is second for size in Surrey, overgrown only by Croydon; and

Kingston has also a Middlesex Lambeth in its transpontine quarter,

Hampton Wick. It is so far the county seat that the Hall of the County

Council has been built here; while it no longer shares with Guildford

and Croydon the dignity of assize town. There was a time when it might

boast of higher rank, for in the tenth century the Saxon kings were

crowned at this Rheims or Scone of South England. It seems always to

have been a place of importance through its ford, then through a bridge

which was long the next one above London Bridge. When a hostile attack

on London failed from the Southwark side, the enemy had nothing for it

but to march all the way round by Kingston, as Sir Thomas Wyat did to

little purpose. In the Civil War a

[Illustration: FROM RICHMOND HILL]

bridge of boats came to be thrown across the river at Putney. The first

movement of this war was about Kingston, a place worth seizing as key of

the road to Portsmouth, so in turn held by Royalists and Roundheads; and

almost the last sharp encounter between the two parties was a running

fight that ended in the outskirts of the town. London citizens of that

day must have had stirring news, when more than once they heard of

hostile forces so near their gates as at Hampton and Hounslow. The

wayfarer on Wimbledon Common is still apt to be startled by the sight of

train-bands slinking in knots from copse to hollow; but these are only

our Boy Scouts practising the devices of modern war; and presently, we

know, they will go home in peace to their tea. It was otherwise when

Captain Hew-Agag-in-pieces, or the doughty Sir Hudibras, could not take

his family on a trip up the river without the risk of falling into the

hands of malignant Philistines, its banks a paradise lost to Milton,

while perhaps Denham or Herrick might have safely ventured--

With soft-smooth virgins for our chaste disport

To Richmond, Kingston, or to Hampton Court.

Near the end of Kingston Bridge, now crossed by a tramway, stands the

restored Church, which has the distinction of being one of the largest

in Surrey, and contains old monuments, besides a show of modern memorial

windows. The chapel where the Saxon kings were crowned has been

destroyed; but the rough stone on which they traditionally sat is

reverently enclosed in the market-place for all to see but not to touch.

Could it speak for itself, this might tell strange tales of forgotten

superstition, like that other boulder in Westminster Abbey, uneasy seat

of Scottish kings, that must have travelled so far by land and sea since

it made Jacob's pillow. By a recently "restored" statue of Queen Anne

before the Town Hall, Kingston also shows special devotion to the memory

of that truly dead sovereign. Such are "the memorials and the things of

fame that do renown this city"--as it might claim to style itself; and

the market-place whereabout they stand makes often a lively and

picturesque scene, on which the quasi-cockney mingles with the true

rustic.

Kingston is a headquarter of Thames boating, and its population must to

a considerable extent be made up of such "Jacks" as are the

camp-followers of this exercise. It is also fortunate in lying close to

three royal parks that have all become practically public

pleasure-grounds. The pleasantest way down the river is by the high edge

of Richmond Park; but below also one may take the tow-path, now on the

Surrey bank; while a middle way is the road passing over Ham Common. The

Middlesex bank is almost entirely taken up by private grounds; though at

Hampton Wick there is a tea-garden resort reached by a path from the

road behind. In the secluded back-water opening here there used to be a

capital bathing station, the nearest to London; but this has now been

closed by the excessive modesty of suburban senators; and not till the

shades of dusk may the youth of Teddington sally forth to make a noisy

Arcadia of the tow-path. Teddington lies in Middlesex, between Hampton

Wick and Twickenham, where the spread of villadom has not yet wholly

overwhelmed market-gardens, like that cultivated lovingly but at a loss

by the author of _Lorna Doone_.

At Teddington (Tide-end-town?) is the last rushing weir, and the Thames

current is for the last time bridled by a lock, not counting that

half-lock at Richmond. Henceforth, without ceasing to be a

pleasure-stream, it attends more strictly to business, and its voyagers

have to reckon with the tide. Above Teddington, the river is frequented

rather by more or less practised oarsmen; but on the Richmond reach we

may find a larger proportion of land-lubbers splashing manfully as best

they can; and on public holidays, it might be safer not to mingle in the

throng of lasses and lads who are trying their prentice hands at aquatic

pursuits, prices being then raised as the standard of experience is

lowered.

All the building is still on the Middlesex side, where Twickenham has

pleasant homes to show, as also celebrated ones like Pope's Villa; but

the main part of the town lies hidden away behind Eel Pie Island. The

Surrey tow-path is bare, but for Ham House, whose famous avenue, beyond

Twickenham Ferry, opens on to the bank, here a broad bowery sward, with

room for all the engaged couples of Petersham and Richmond to keep aloof

from each other. Eyes less preoccupied will be attracted to the trees

and lawns of Orleans House and Marble Hill across the river, then

arrested by the noble brow of Richmond Hill that seems to bar our way

on.

Richmond, of old known as West Sheen, was once a royal residence, and

its Green shows a fragment of the palace in which Elizabeth and other

sovereigns died. Most of Richmond's antiquity has disappeared, down to

the renowned Cobweb Cellar, swept away two or three years ago, beneath a

rebuilt tavern; but much of the place still wears a dignified look of

Georgian old fashion, borne out by the narrow, bent main thoroughfare

that on a Saturday night will be more crowded than the Strand. The newer

streets above are quiet and genteel enough; but all the quarter between

the station and the front of busy boat-houses lays itself out for

strangers brought by four railway lines from London; and the streets

here are thickly set with houses of entertainment of every rank,

including confectioners to provide the "maids of honour" cheese-cakes

that are at Richmond what whitebait is or was at Greenwich. These two

places long made rival goals of London junketings up and down the river;

but automobiles now ply farther afield, carrying their best customers

past the Richmond hotels, so that the renowned "Star and Garter" had to

close its doors, to be reconstructed as a hospital for disabled

soldiers.

The great sight here, of course, is Richmond Hill, to which a gradual

ascent leads from the bridge, or from the bank above the boat-houses a

steeper one up the slope laid out as a beautiful public garden, its

highest part a shady terrace, commanding that rich landscape over which

gazed Jeanie Deans, in her heart perhaps preferring the view from

Arthur's Seat. "A huge sea of verdure, with crossing and intersecting

promontories of massive and tufted groves, was tenanted by numberless

flocks and herds, which seemed to wander unrestrained and unbounded

through the rich pastures. The Thames, here turreted with villas and

there garlanded with forests, moved on slowly and placidly, like the

mighty monarch of the scene, to whom all its other beauties were but

accessories." Flocks and herds, indeed, are not so visible in our day;

but the hundred barks and skiffs seen by Scott, may appear multiplied by

tenfold on the reach of the river extending at our feet.

Passing on before the transformed "Star and Garter," and through the

gate of the Park, from this corner of it one has the same outlook--

... Here let us sweep

The boundless landscape: now the raptured eye

Exulting swift to huge Augusta send,

Now to the Sister Hills that skirt her plain,

To lofty Harrow now, and now to where

Majestic Windsor lifts his princely brow....

Heavens! what a goodly prospect spreads around,

Of hills and dales, and woods and lawns and spires,

And glittering towns, and gilded streams, till all

The stretching landscape into smoke decays.

Richmond Park is nearly nine miles in circuit, at its Robin Hood Gate

almost adjoining the wilder expanse of Putney Heath and Wimbledon

Common. It is a royal demesne, but by degrees, one of them a "village

Hampden" lawsuit, it has come to be treated as a public pleasure-ground.

Quite recently King Edward crowned former concessions by giving up

game-preserving in the many thickets that shade its swards, stocked with

herds of not too shy deer. In a central hollow are ponds that serve for

skating. Every part is now open except the enclosures of several

residences within the park, which are tenanted by royal favour. The

White Lodge on the farther side was the youthful home of the Princess of

Wales. Pembroke Lodge, near the Richmond Gate, was granted as retreat to

the veteran statesman Earl Russell, having originally been built for

that Countess of Pembroke young George III. loved in vain. On a mound

here Henry VIII. is said to have watched for the rocket from Anne

Boleyn's scaffold on Tower Hill, as signal of his being a not

disconsolate widower.

On the riverside below Richmond Green, for public recreation is also

given up the old Deer Park, over which the Chinese pagoda beacons us

towards Kew Gardens. The Observatory here has now, through disturbance

caused by the vicinity of electric lines, lost its function of testing

delicate instruments. Along the road by the Lion Gate of the Gardens,

Richmond and Kew almost run into each other. As usual, it is twice as

far by the pleasanter path on the bank, which passes outside the Park

and Gardens, with views across the river upon St. Margaret's, then on

Isleworth, on the grounds of Sion House, the home of an English Duke,

but at Lisbon its keys are or long were kept by the sisterhood banished

hence at the Reformation; then on the wharves and slums of Brentford,

county town of Middlesex, where the Brent makes shamefaced confluence as

a canal. Thus we come to the new Kew Bridge and Kew Green, which still

keeps a look of the dignity it wore as a favourite residence of George

III.; even in our own day it has housed a branch of the royal family at

Cambridge Cottage. The place is a great resort of his present Majesty's

subjects, for whose refreshment appear many tea-houses and taverns. The

grounds of Kew Palace are now thrown into the gardens, that,

[Illustration: RICHMOND.]

open at all reasonable hours, make such a famous sight. Every Londoner

knows the Palm-Houses, the Botanical Houses, the show of aquatic plants,

and the gallery of Miss North's paintings from all over the world. But

what many a visitor may pass unnoticed is what Richard Jefferies judged

the best show of all, the enclosure called the Herbaceous Ground, "a

living dictionary of English wildflowers," to which "the meadow and the

cornfield, the river, the mountain and the woodland, the sea shore, the

very waste place by the roadside, each has sent its peculiar

representatives," so as here to present an essence of wild nature, and

an epitome of the hills, woodland banks, and hedgerows of Surrey.

Thomson poetically speaks of Richmond as the place where "silver Thames

first rural grows"; but in prosaic fact the Surrey bank below Kew may

often be found a bushy solitude, sometimes a sloppy one, when overflowed

by high tides; and on the other side, the villas of Gunnersbury once

passed, the advance of Chiswick is masked by trees and market-gardens as

yet occupying a tongue of flat land, round which the river makes a

southward bend. The tow-path takes us on beside Mortlake, reached at its

"White Hart" haven of London omnibuses, and beneath the railway bridge,

so crowded when this is the goal of the University boat-race. Did one

care to explore Mortlake, in the Roman Catholic cemetery, behind the

station, would be found an extraordinary modern tomb, a huge stone tent

decorated with crescents and stars more conspicuous than crosses,

beneath which Sir Richard Burton rests after his many travels. In the

church is buried Dr. Dee, that "last of the magicians," who was indeed

one of the first of our mathematicians. Farther back Richmond Park is

gained through the amenities of Sheen, now dwindling before the builder;

but there is still a pretty patch of Sheen Common.

The river front of Mortlake almost touches that of Barnes. Here it is

the turn of Surrey to throw out a flat promontory of market-gardens,

across the neck of which one can make a short-cut to Putney or to Barnes

Common. Keeping the bank, one has rather a dull walk round by the ferry

to Chiswick Church, then opposite Chiswick Mall and the old-fashioned

riverside front of Hammersmith, where the bridge would bring one fairly

into London. The London County Council's scheme to run regular steamers

so far did not command the success it deserved; but in the fine season

ply occasional excursion Argoes, holding on up to Kew or still farther.

The river now becomes imprisoned in water-works, wharves, and piers; and

at low tide it reveals unlovely stretches of mud below the scrubby withs

that bind this shorn Samson's writhings. Yet still, besides craft of

business, it may be found alive with boats, including police-cruisers

commissioned against boys surreptitiously bathing from a bit of

rubbish-strewn wilderness on the Middlesex bank, that in a few years

will be overflowed by the tide of houses creeping up behind. Meanwhile,

why not leave those unshamed urchins alone, whose aquatic gambols till

lately made a cooling sight from the opposite tow-path? One or two of

them were drowned every year, it is said; but the sum of life saved by

our grandmotherly councillors must fall far below the amount of health,

cleanliness, and cheerfulness stolen on such waste spots; and it might

well be considered what will become of this country a generation after

its youth has been schooled and policed out of exulting to risk life,

limb, and skin.

I forget what last-century autobiographer mentions a party of

schoolfellows landing to bathe a little higher up in the grounds of

Brandenburgh House, then occupied by the Margravine of Anspach, and

being surprised by her unserene Highness in person, who, armed with a

riding whip, took the young Adams at sore disadvantage. This vivacious

Amazon had been widow of Lord Craven, who built another house, called

Craven Cottage, just below the osier-fronted waste at present awaiting

reclamation. The Craven Cottage grounds have been fortified and

garrisoned by a club that carries on the business of drawing enormous

crowds to bet and roar over the performances of professional athletes,

their din suggesting another hint as to the welfare of the next

generation. But we may take hope to see how manfully the striplings of

Putney and Hammersmith ply oar and sculls in what else might be their

hours of ease; as everywhere within reach of the capital, that

sympathetic visitor, Mr. John Burroughs, could admire "young athletic

London, male and female, rushing forth as hungry for the open air and

the water as young mountain herds for salt."

Ramblers on the Surrey side get a tantalising glimpse of expensive

pastimes, for the tow-path leads them beside the grounds of Barn Elms,

home of more than one notability in the last three centuries, now arena

of the Ranelagh Club's sports. At the end of this enclosure is bridged

what looks like a muddy back-water, but is the mouth of the Beverley

Brook, so idyllic as it flows by Wimbledon Common to Roehampton; then

beyond we come to the boat clubs and taverns of Putney, facing the

grounds of Fulham Palace, now turned into a public park along the river

wall.

Putney is a suburb of much respectability, rising on to heights of

gentility at the back, and merging with the super-gentility of

Roehampton's palatial villas. In future this birthplace of Gibbon may

also be known as abode of the poet Swinburne. At present it has an

annual hour of clamorous fame as starting-place of the University

boat-race. In the past it made an appearance in history as headquarters

of Cromwell's army during the autumn of 1647, while negotiations went on

with the Parliament at Westminster on one hand, and with the King at

Hampton Court on the other. The church, then used as a council hall, has

one fine old feature in the chantry of Bishop West; and the way in which

it faces the corresponding tower of Fulham has provoked a legend of

their having been built by two giant sisters, who, as in the case of St.

Catherine's and St. Martha's Chapel near Guildford, are credited with

using one hammer between them, which they flung backwards and forwards

across the river.

Putney, as yet unfettered by tramways, is closely linked with London by

motor-buses plying all the way to northern and eastern suburbs, as well

as by trains of more than one line. But now the tow-path fails us, and

we must take ship to keep an eye on the Surrey shores. A little below,

the river will touch the four-mile-circle from Charing Cross. Once more

it is bordered by trees and lawns, but these belong to Hurlingham Club

and to Wandsworth's new park; and it has far to go before reaching green

fields again on the shores of Kent and Essex. Shades of its prison-house

close in upon it fast, beginning with the group of grimy wharves and

mills amid which ends the bedraggled Wandle, turned to many a task from

its source to its mouth. The old buildings of Wandsworth have been

vanishing like the Mayoralty of Garratt Green behind it; but it has

still some quaint nooks, and the true Surrey feature of its open Common.

The next steamboat stage is by Battersea Reach, where it takes an

artist's eye to catch the points of beauty dear to Turner. Battersea

Park faces the restored dignity of Chelsea. A huge railway arsenal

covers the site of those Nine Elms that have long gone to make coffins

for the dancers in Vauxhall Gardens. Doulton's pottery works look across

to the Tate Gallery. Lambeth Palace is passed, then St. Thomas's

Hospital stares from wakeful eyes at the House of Parliament. Below

Westminster Bridge, Surrey is to give a site for the _Hôtel de Ville_ of

our County Council; but as yet the bank here makes a shabby contrast to

the clubs and hotels of the Middlesex side. St. Paul's looks down upon

Southwark, which has now a Cathedral Church of its own in St. Saviour's,

with its old monuments and new memorial windows. This lies at the end of

London Bridge, beyond which the tanneries of Bermondsey have hidden the

very site of its once famous Abbey, opposite the Tower of London. The

last Surrey parish is Rotherhithe, where Captain Lemuel Gulliver could

find a pleasant retreat after his voyages, when it was known as Redriff;

but now the name of its Cherry Orchard pier seems a mockery, till one

searches out the groves and garden-beds of Southwark Park, hidden behind

a front of wharves and warehouses. A dull change this from the green

meads of Egham or the slopes of Richmond. But a painter in words, too

early lost to his Surrey home, George W. Steevens, can show colour,

life, and romance in those avenues of dingy buildings and naked masts.

Always the benign sun-and-smoke clothes them with softness and

harmony; it softens their vermilion advertisements to harmony with

the tinted azure of the sky and the vague grey-brown of the water.

Brutal business built them, to ship and unship, and be as crass and

crude as they would, but the smoke turns them into the semblance of

sleepy monsters basking by the river they love. Presently the tall

sky-line breaks and drops; let in between the monsters appears a

terrace of tiny riverside houses, huddled together as in a

miniature. There is a tiny tavern with a plank-built terrace rising

on piles out of the water, a tiny shop all aslant, a tiny brown

house with a pot-belly of a bow-window. It all babbles of Jack and

Poll, of crimps and tots of rum, and incredible yarns in the

bar-parlour. Next, between the dusky wharves, an Italian

church-tower soars up out of a nest of poor houses; the sun catches

its white face and transfigures it. Then, the dearest sight of

all--ships appearing out of the land, fore and main and mizzen,

peak and truck, halliards and stays, and men like flies furling

top-gallant sails above the roofs of London. As we open the region

of the docks we are in a great city of ships--big steamers basking

lazily with their red bellies half out of water, frantic

spluttering tugs, placid brown-sailed barges, reckless banging

lighters--and behind all this, clumps and thickets and avenues of

masts and spars and tackle stretching stretching infinitely on

every side. The houses have melted all away, and London is become a

city of ships.

Here we go on shore from Father Thames, that

[Illustration: THE MEADS, FARNHAM.]

sober and steady as he looks, leads so many a British stream to end its

skittish, froward, and headstrong youth by running away to sea:--

And round about him many a pretty page

Attended duly, ready to obey;

All little rivers which owe vassalage

To him, as to their lord, and tribute pay:

The chalky Kennet and the Thetis grey;

The moorish Colne, and the soft sliding Breane;

The wanton Lea, that oft doth lose his way;

And the still Darent, in whose waters clean

Ten thousand fishes play and deck his pleasant stream.

Further on in his catalogue of rivers, Spenser gives the Mole a whole

couplet to itself, well known to guide-book writers in search of copy.

But one rubs one's eyes to find him omitting Surrey's principal

tributary, so compliant, too, in yoke of rhyme,--the Wey, a clansman of

the Welsh Wye, and also of that disguised "Thetis grey," which turns out

to be the stream flowing into the Thames at Cookham, on maps styled Wye,

though a high authority suspects that it adopted this good old British

name only by suggestion from its course beside Wycombe, even as the men

of some broken clan might wrap themselves in the tartan of Campbell or

Macdonald.

III

DOWN THE WEY

The chief river flowing through Surrey is one which Pope shows himself

not infallible in mislabelling "the chalky Wey that pours a milky wave."

But as the Amazon is not altogether a Brazilian stream, so the Wey has

its rise in other counties; and still further to compare great and

small, there might be some question as to its main source. One branch

springs on Blackdown in Sussex, flowing round Hindhead; another comes

less deviously from beyond the Hampshire Alton, rising beside White's

Selborne. The latter has more honour in maps, so let us take this up

where it enters a bulging south-western corner of Surrey near Farnham's

pleasant market-town, whose antiquity is vouched for by a scattering of

old houses and cobbled ways about the long main street. Here the Wey

crooks through green meadows, on which oast-houses and stacked

hop-poles, if not a show of trailing vines, reveal the rich gault soil

making this corner of the country an oasis of hop cultivation,

especially in the woodbine variety. It is but natural, then, that ale

should be a renowned product of Farnham, which has also, at the outlying

village of Wrecclesham, a notable manufactory of green pottery known as

Farnham ware. If I am not mistaken, the hop-fields appear to have shrunk

of late years hereabouts; but still Farnham would make a scene for that

story of a learned stranger preaching on the evidences of design as

evinced in the study of optics, and being duly complimented by the

churchwarden: "capital sermon of yours, sir, about the 'opsticks; we

mostly calls 'em 'oppoles in these parts; but we knew what you meant!"

The lion of the place is its Castle, originally built in Stephen's

troubled days, and now making a lordly abode for the Bishops of

Winchester. Its most prominent appearance in our annals is during the

Civil War, when it was held for the Parliament by George Wither, and for

the King by a more loyal bard, Sir John Denham, but was partly blown up

by the namesake of another poet, Sir William Waller; then it came to be

dismantled under Cromwell. Restored and modernised, it still preserves

the ivied Keep enshrining a flower garden, Fox's Tower, the stately

hall, the ancient servants' hall and kitchen, the chapel with its rich

carvings, said to be by Grinling Gibbons, and other old features to put

a prelate in no danger of forgetting his historic dignity. The park,

with its elm avenue, open to the public, is a noble expanse sloping up

towards Hungry Hill, by which one passes from this home of peaceful

state to the dusty purlieus of Aldershot Camp.

Below the Castle, on the opposite side of the high-road, stands the

Parish Church, among whose memorials the most interesting is the tomb of

William Cobbett beside the porch. Inside the building also is a tablet

in his honour, as could hardly have been foreseen by that porcupinish

Tory-democrat, whose quills were so readily roused at the very name of a

parson. He is believed, not without question, to have been born at the

"Jolly Farmer" Inn, near the station; and he died at Normandy Farm, on

the north side of the Hog's Back. Amid his crabbed grumblings and

cross-grained whims, his heart always warms at the recollection of

boyish toils and pranks about Farnham, his early entrance on life as an

unschooled bird-scarer, his games of rolling and sliding down the sandy

sides of Crooksbury, his bird's-nesting sport on its tall trees, his

trotting after the hounds, and his malicious trick of drawing a red

herring across a hare's scent to revenge himself for a cut from the

huntsman's whip.

Another memory honoured at Farnham is that of Augustus Toplady, author

of "Rock of Ages," better known than "Rural Rides," who was born here,

1740. Izaak Walton was a sojourner at the Castle, and must have had many

a day on the Wey, as in his old age on the Itchen. A writer of our own

time connected with Farnham was "Edna Lyall," more than one of whose

novels contains sympathetic descriptions of the scenery around

"Firdale," the quiet market-town that "wound its long street of

red-roofed houses along a sheltered valley, in between fir-crowned

heights."

But more resounding names are familiar in this neighbourhood. Just

outside of the town, down the Wey, lies Moor Park, the seat of Sir

William Temple, whose saturnine dependant Swift here ate the bitter

bread of servitude, and at least began _A Tale of a Tub_, that would

make such an inspiring model for Cobbett, the gardener's boy, who on his

runaway trip to Kew spent all the coppers he had left on a copy of it,

curiosity being for once stronger than hunger. For a time Moor Park was

turned into a Hydropathic Establishment. A recent owner tried to shut up

the old right of way through it, but was sturdily withstood by the

Cobbetts of this generation; and one can walk unquestioned right beside

the house and garden, where Temple's heart is buried under a sundial;

then on past the cavern keeping green the name of Mother Ludlam, a

mistily white witch, whose caldron is still shown in Frensham Church.

Thus may be reached the farther gate near the Wey, beside which a

restored cottage is pointed out by vague tradition as the abode either

of Swift or of Stella, or as their meeting-place.

Across the bridge here opens the gate of another park, in which are

enclosed the remains of Waverley Abbey, the finest ecclesiastical ruins

in Surrey, not very rich in such treasures. This was the first

Cistercian monastery in England, whose scanty remains stand tangled in

greenery, a beautiful sight, and still substantial enough to indicate

its fallen grandeur. Recent excavations by the Surrey Archæological

Society have been well rewarded. The eighteenth-century mansion kept the

old monks' garden, in which Cobbett worked as a boy, and got his fill

of fruit, for, he says, the produce could never have been consumed

unless the servants lent a mouth. A visitor to the neighbourhood was Sir

Walter Scott, who carried away the name of Waverley as a fruitful seed.

His famous novel has nothing of the Abbey save its name; but _Sir

Nigel_, a lively work of one of our generation's romancers, Sir A. Conan

Doyle, has brought this skeleton of a great religious house to life for

us as it was in Plantagenet days.

In the centre lay the broad Abbey buildings, with church and

cloisters, hospitium, chapter-house and fraterhouse, all buzzing

with a busy life. Through the open window came the low hum of the

voices of the brethren as they walked in pious converse in the

ambulatory below. From across the cloisters there rolled the

distant rise and fall of a Gregorian chaunt, where the precentor

was hard at work upon the choir; while down in the chapter-house

sounded the strident voice of Brother Peter, expounding the rule of

St. Bernard to the novices. Abbot John rose to stretch his cramped

limbs. He looked out at the green sward of the cloisters and at the

graceful line of open Gothic arches which skirted a covered walk

for the brethren within. Two and two, in their black and white

garb, with slow step and heads inclined, they paced round and

round. Several of the more studious had brought their illuminating

work from the scriptorium and sat in the warm sunshine, with their

little platters of pigments and packets of gold-leaf before them,

their shoulders rounded and their faces sunk low over the white

sheets of vellum. There, too, was the copper-worker, with his

burin and graver. Learning and art were not traditions with the

Cistercians as with the parent Order of the Benedictines, and yet

the library of Waverley was well filled both with precious books

and with pious students. But the true glory of the Cistercian lay

in his outdoor work; and so ever and anon there passed through the

cloister some sunburned monk, soiled mattock or shovel in hand,

with his gown looped to his knee, fresh from the fields or the

garden. The lush green water-meadows speckled with the

heavy-fleeced sheep, the acres of cornland reclaimed from heather

and bracken, the vineyards on the southern slope of Crooksbury

Hill, the rows of Hankley fishponds, the Frensham marshes drained

and sown with vegetables, the spacious pigeon cotes, all circled

the great Abbey round with the visible labours of the Order.

An active youth, like the hero of this tale, might have followed the

windings of the Wey below Farnham, whence it sets out as with a bold

design of tunnelling the Hog's Back, but is content to turn away after

piercing the railway. The heedful pedestrian had better not try to keep

by its green banks. From Farnham station he has a pretty walk by a road

that in half an hour brings him to the Waverley end of the bridge. For

the longer way to the other side, he takes the Hog's Back road, turning

off on a byway marked "Moor Park." Above this left bank, opposite

Waverley Abbey, rise the well-wooded slopes of Crooksbury, that to

Cobbett's untravelled eyes seemed such

[Illustration: SOMERSET BRIDGE, NEAR ELSTEAD.]

a mighty mountain; but he may often have scampered up it in a few

minutes. From the top there is an open look-out upon the line of the

Hog's Back to the north; in other directions the view is much impeded by

the tall trees, ranked in sharp lines, that from some points suggest a

gigantic yew clipped to a pattern.

An hour's walk by road through the foot of these woods would bring us

back to the much meandering course of the river at Elstead, but at the

cost of leaving out Tilford, where comes in the branch from Blackdown.

One should by all means turn off on the right to this picturesque

village, with its islanded green, its old bridges, and its "King's Oak,"

reputed as marking the boundary of the Abbey lands in Stephen's reign.

Such great age for this landmark has been questioned, but it shows so

plainly the burden of time that a colleague and successor has been

provided which will authentically chronicle the date of Queen Victoria's

Diamond Jubilee. Tilford Church, not very attractive outside, has a

reredos in memory of Charlotte Smith, that now forgotten novelist, who

died a century ago at Tilford House, said to have been known to another

author still well remembered in nurseries, Dr. Watts.

From Tilford open beautiful rambles by Frensham Ponds on to the heaths

of Hindhead, also to be gained from Elstead by way of Thursley and the

Punch Bowl. On the other side of the river, fine commons rise up to the

Hog's Back. Between these swelling and bristling heights, we follow the

green valley of the Wey, that below Elstead again ties itself into knots

of vagary, then beyond the Somerset Bridge begins to behave more

prettily as it enters the park of Peperharow. To the left side stands

Lord Midleton's mansion, near the Church, restored from the designs of

Pugin, and enriched with interior ornamentation that make it one of the

finest in this part of Surrey. On the other side, at the south edge of

the Park, in Oxenford Farm, which keeps its fragment of real antiquity,

Pugin reproduced an old English grange; and not far off the same

architect built a shrine for Bonfield Well, one of old medical repute.

As may be supposed from the fact of a parish church standing in the

middle of this demesne, there is a public way through it, coming out at

the village of Eashing, where one should not neglect to visit the

picturesque old bridge, now guarded against parochial vandalism by the

National Trust.

The Godalming high-road, running by the south side of Peperharow, here

deserts the Wey valley. Another road, crossing at Eashing, mounts up by

the fine modern Church of Shackleford and over the heights of Hurtmore,

to come down again to Godalming by the Charterhouse School. But the

pedestrian should by all means keep a path near the left side of the

Wey, passing under a high bank to the bend where, along a charming

little bit of woodland, cleft by green gulleys, is reached a closed-in

swimming-place. Beyond this first sign of Godalming he gets on a road

again, below that hillside suburb that has grown up about the

transplanted Charterhouse School.

Thackeray's contemporaries would stare to see their old "Smithfield"

seminary in its picturesque new surroundings, the chief buildings set on

a hill, where they form a conspicuous landmark. Only foreigners may need

to be told how Charterhouse is one of our oldest "public hives of

puerile resort" fixed in the heart of London till a generation ago, when

it set the example of swarming into the country, as has since been the

tendency of other great London schools. From the original building, now

occupied by Merchant Taylors' School, was brought bodily the old

archway, carved with idle names, Thackeray's among them; but the rest

of the buildings wear an air of still spick-and-span dignity. The Chapel

is worth seeing, and so is the Museum, which contains MSS. and drawings

of Thackeray, letters of John Wesley and John Leech, and relics of the

South African war given by another _alumnus_, General Baden Powell, who

laid the foundation of the cloisters leading to the Chapel, as a

memorial of old Carthusians not so fortunate in coming back from that

war. Since the school was moved from London it has flourished well; for

long under the head-mastership of Dr. Haig-Brown, of whom it is told

that when the Mayor of Godalming, in proposing his health, complimented

him as a combination of the _fort[=i]ter in re_ with the _suav[=i]ter in

modo_, this pained scholar professed to be overwhelmed not only by the

quality but by the _quantity_ of such praise.

With so scholastic a garrison in its citadel, Godalming may now

stereotype its spelling and pronunciation. Pepys writes it as

_Godliman_; and by old-fashioned folk in later days it was vernacularly

spoken of somewhat as _Gorlmin_. The main part of the town lies out of

sight behind the other bank, below which a trout of over 12 lbs. was

caught not many years ago; but coarse fish are the more frequent spoil

of local anglers. Across the bridge the road takes us by the Church and

up into the High Street, showing old inns, picturesque seventeenth-century

dwellings, and a quaint Market House near the upper end. Above the

station, on the farther side of the line, is Westbrook, the home of

General Oglethorpe, the philanthropic founder of Georgia, which he

designed as a refuge for poverty-stricken Britons and persecuted German

Protestants.

Americans will admire this as a good specimen of the English

market-town, old enough to be mentioned in King Alfred's will. England

has hundreds of such towns to show, but not many of them are surrounded

by so beautiful a mingling of meadowland and woodland, of hill, heath,

and water scenery, often illustrated by Creswick, Hook, and Birket

Foster. In all directions there are lovely walks and drives. The water

tower over the Charterhouse shows the heights above the Wey, across

which go roads to Loseley, Compton, and the Hog's Back. On the opposite

side a more distant tower rises upon a swell of woods, parks, and

heaths, through which is the way to Bramley and Wonersh. The high-road

southward for Portsmouth goes along a well-wooded valley to Milford,

where it mounts the broken and pitted heaths for Hindhead, while the

fork to the left follows the railway to Witley and Haslemere. Perhaps

the finest walk in this direction is along the wooded heights to the

east of the railway, where can be gained High Down Ball, a bare knoll

looking over the woods; then by Hambledon Common one can turn down to

Witley station in the valley, or keep the heights--

where Hascombe vaunts

Its beechen bowers and Dryad haunts.

With such hints for divagation, let us resume our way down the river,

henceforth navigable by barges and bridled by locks. Its course now is

over the flat of Pease Marsh, towards the high chalk coast-line three or

four miles ahead, shut in on either side by lower heights; and about

half-way there opens a view of Guildford in the gap through which it

will pass the Downs. On the right side was the junction of the now

abandoned Wey and Arun Canal, its grass-grown trench making a peculiar

and not unpleasing feature in the valley to the south-east, beneath the

picturesque crests and clumps that hide Wonersh. The spire of Shalford

Church welcomes us to another of the many "prettiest villages in

Surrey," where is the confluence of the Tillingbourne flowing down from

Leith Hill between the chalk and the sand ridges, by whose varied

heights we are now beautifully surrounded. We pass under St. Catherine's

Chapel at the crossing of the Pilgrims' Way, which mounts among the

woods to high-perched St. Martha's, two or three miles on the right.

There are roads on either side the river as it winds into the Downs, but

the tow-path, unless in wet weather, makes the best way, bordered as it

is by noble trees hanging over from private grounds. And so, beside a

picturesque mill-race, we come into the lower end of Guildford, near the

railway station, where the playful river for the first time finds itself

imprisoned by buildings.

Guildford is Surrey's county town, though so far shorn of its dignity

that the County Council meets at Kingston, and much overgrown by

Croydon, not to speak of the South London suburbs. There is no question

as to its antiquity. It seems to have been a place of note in Saxon

days; then, soon after the Conquest, a lordly castle was built here,

that came to be visited by several of our Norman sovereigns. The town

was so happy as not to figure much in history, and to this it may owe

the preservation of so many old buildings. There is no southern county

seat that looks its part better than Surrey's, even since in our day its

time-honoured features have been much overlaid by new ones, while

everywhere it wears an air of roominess and thrivingness not always

associated with the picturesque. Being only thirty miles from London,

reached by three, nay four railway lines, it has become a favourite

place of residence for business men and of retreat for officers, whose

houses go on spreading up the dry and airy slopes of the Downs, above

the old town rooted in the hollow of the Wey. Hence steeply-mounting,

the broad main thoroughfare well displays its points of gabled roofs,

projecting oriel windows and quaint doorways, more than one of the old

houses, such as No. 25 and the Angel Inn with its vaults, being

themselves notable sights. "Shall we go see the relics of this town?" If

so, nearly all of them lie along or about its unique High Street, up

which let us stroll, beginning from the bridge in the dip below the

railway station, which is on the other side of the river.

Above the bridge stands up the tower of St. Nicholas, one of Guildford's

three parish churches,

[Illustration: A HAYFIELD, WONERSH.]

which has been more than once rebuilt, but preserves the ancient Loseley

Chapel, containing fine monuments of the More family. A little way up

the High Street, to the right, in Quarry Street, will be found the old

church of St. Mary's, partly built of chalk mixed with flint and rubble,

showing many remarkable points of interest and controversy for

archæologists, among them a bit claimed as Saxon, some grotesque

corbels, and the vaulted roof of St. John's Chapel, ornamented with grim

mediæval frescoes, which, like those in Chaldon Church, have become much

obliterated, but it is now proposed to revive them. Their subject seems

to be various marvels and horrors, mostly connected with legends of St.

John; and they have been taken for the work of William of Florence, an

artist employed by Henry III.

On the other side of High Street, a projecting clock face marks the

Guildhall, dating from the end of the seventeenth century. This is a

place to be visited, for behind its striking exterior are treasured

several royal portraits, among them Charles II. and James II. by Lely,

also some curious carvings on the mantelpiece of the Council Chamber,

with a collection of standard measures of 1601 given by Queen Elizabeth.

The woolsacks in the town arms commemorate a former renown for the

making of cloth, also woven at surrounding villages, an industry said to

have decayed through shortcomings on the part of the manufacturers.

Aubrey asserts that Wonersh, now such a quiet village, flourished by

making blue cloths for the Canary Islands, till the greedy clothiers hit

on a trick of stretching out a web of 18 yards to 22 or 23, which led to

their losing the market.

At the top of the ascent, on the right-hand side, is the High or Trinity

Church, rebuilt in the eighteenth century, not very pleasing in itself,

but enshrining some of the old memorials, as well as later ones. One of

these, in all the absurdity of classical costume, shows the recumbent

effigy of Speaker Onslow, who so long and so worthily filled the Chair

of the House of Commons, and whose family are still Guildford's great

neighbours and patrons. The principal monument is the elaborate one to

Archbishop Abbot of Canterbury (d. 1633), erected in the old church by

his brother Sir Maurice Abbot, a Lord Mayor of London, to be beheld by

Pepys among other tombs "kept mighty neat and clean with curtains before

them." This prelate stands high among the benefactors of his native

town, though as a stalwart Puritan he has had hard things said against

him. His chief claim to remembrance is as one of the body of scholars

who translated or edited the authorised version of the Bible. Another of

"that happy ternion of brothers," as Fuller calls them, was Robert

Abbot, who by long display of learning came to be Bishop of

Salisbury--"but alas! he was hardly warm in his see before cold in his

coffin." As for George, the archbishop, "he did first _creep_, then

_run_, then _fly_ into preferment," yet to have his wings painfully

clipped after he had reached the highest post of the English Church.

Shooting deer at Bramshill Park, near what was to be the rectory of his

descendant, Charles Kingsley, this muscular Christian primate had the

ill-luck to kill a keeper. Like the keen sportsman he was, King James

made light of the accident, as one that might happen to any one; and a

jury threw the blame on the victim; but the scandal was so great that it

seemed well to grant a royal pardon to the right reverend manslayer.

Even then, three Bishops-elect, Laud among them, declined to receive

consecration at his blood-stained hands. The unfortunate Archbishop

showed himself greatly concerned; he settled a pension on the man's

widow, who with such a dowry soon got another husband; and he kept a

monthly fast for the rest of his life. The story goes that he never

smiled again. For a time he went into retirement at the Hospital with

which he had endowed Guildford, as an almshouse for the tradesmen whose

decaying industry he strove to restore. But we hear of no remorse for

what seems a darker offence than accidental manslaughter--the pains this

Archbishop had taken, in 1611, to get two unfortunate men burned for

their damnable guilt in disagreeing with him on a point of theology.

Abbot's Hospital, standing just opposite the church, is one of the

principal sights of the town, a building of stately picturesqueness that

bettered its model, the similar institution founded by Archbishop

Whitgift at Croydon. Passing through the noble archway adorned with the

arms of Canterbury, and under the imposing tower with its domed turrets,

the visitor finds himself back in a quiet nook of Jacobean England,

where all seems in keeping with its motto, _Deus nobis haec otia fecit_.

On the left of the gardened quadrangle are the apartments of the twelve

brethren, on the right those of eight sisters, all bound not to practise

forgery, heresy, sorcery, witchcraft and other crimes. Farther on are

reached the Master's house, and the entrance to the Hall and Chapel.

The panelled Hall preserves its old fittings, and some portraits of

sound Protestant divines, while in the coloured glass will be noticed

the inscription of a quite mediæval pun, _Clamamus Abba Pater_. The most

striking feature of the Chapel is the two painted windows telling the

story of Jacob, in pictures with Latin legends, the first representing

Esau's hunting errand, that must afterwards have been a sore subject

with that pious founder.

High Street, now mounted to its highest, goes on as Spital Street to

fork eventually as the Epsom and the London Roads, both of them, indeed,

leading to London. Beyond this, all is smart and modern, where an airy

suburb straggles on to the Downs. But on the right of Spital Street was

passed the Grammar School, founded at the beginning of the sixteenth

century, and still preserving some of its old features that make it

worth a visit. Its treasure is a library of chained books, several

scores in number, surpassed only by those at Wimborne Minster and at

Hereford Cathedral. Schoolboys of our generation may be more interested

in an antiquarian discovery of Dr. W. G. Grace, who found a musty record

of the Guildford boys playing cricket so far back as the time of Queen

Bess.

To the last has been left that which is not the least of Guildford's

lions, its old Castle, standing above St. Mary's, a little to the right

of the Market as we came up High Street. Guildford Castle is believed to

date from Henry II., but first comes to mention in King John's time.

What has been left of it by the power _Edax rerum_ is mainly its grim

keep, solidly planted on a mound that may have been the site of a

pre-Norman fortress. Beside this, part of the area is prettily laid out

as a public garden. Some curious bits of carving are to be noted in the

keep. Within the gateway on the lower side will be found the Surrey

Archæological Society's Museum, not a very large one as yet, but

containing a varied show of county antiquities. From the top of the keep

there is a fine view of the Wey valley.

This view may be enlarged by mounting the lane behind, that leads to a

much less imposing modern fort on the Downs, by which goes out the grand

walk along them to Newland's Corner, and on by the line of the Pilgrims'

Way. On the opposite block of the Downs, above Guildford, the cemetery

affords another good prospect point, reached by taking the steep rise of

the old Hog's Back road leading up from the bridge below the station.

Near the entrance of this finely displayed burial-ground, a marble cross

marks the grave of the author of _Alice in Wonderland_, with whom

Guildford was a favourite sojourn. "There must have been something

remarkable about that gentleman," an official of the place opined to me,

"for a good many has asked me where he lies." One spectacle is no longer

available on this stiff ascent, at the top of which, as Defoe states

admiringly, the gallows used to stand so plain in view "that the Towns

People from the High Street may sit at their Shop Doors and see the

Criminals executed."

Fair scenes about Guildford will be spoken of under another head. Let us

here hold on down the Wey, which henceforth takes two forms, now

coinciding, then going apart, the canalised Wey Navigation, and the

wilful loops that could not be made to fit the course of this water-way,

for which they have suffered depletion, but in flood time can yet assert

themselves by turning the low meadows into lakes. As in the case of

Hogarth's "Industrious Apprentice," the canal has thriven so that it may

be called the main stream, while it is seldom so straight-lined or

business-minded but that its tow-path makes a pleasant riverside walk.

This canalisation was carried out as far back as the middle of the

seventeenth century, just after the Civil War, locks being then first

introduced into England; and the opening of such a convenience for

carrying corn and timber to London helped to bring back Guildford's old

prosperity.

Over flat meadows, the river goes out to the north, bending round the

suburb of Stoke Park, then takes its course by a series of locks,

bridges, and mills that make goals for boating parties. The first name

of fame it reaches, some three straight miles from the town, is Sutton

Place, standing back in its park that stretches down to the left bank.

Loseley, above Guildford, is Sutton's only rival as at once the

stateliest and loveliest mansion in Surrey, taking a high place among

the lordly halls of England. In the Reformation days, when donjon keeps

could give place to orieled and gabled mansions, this was built by Sir

Richard Weston, ancestor and namesake of the Wey's canaliser. A peculiar

feature is the use made of terra-cotta, on which, as on the windows of

the Hall, is repeated the builder's _rebus_, a bunch of grapes and a

tun. It need hardly be said that such a house is rich in relics of the

past. But indeed one cannot here speak worthily of what has had a whole

sumptuous quarto devoted to it by Mr. Frederic Harrison,

[Illustration: PYRFORD CHURCH, NEAR WOKING.]

who may well call it a landmark of English architecture, one of the

earliest great houses not built with a design of defence.

The house is almost contemporary with some of those exquisite

châteaux of the age of Francis which are still preserved on the

Loire. Like them, it possesses Italian features of a fancy and

grace as remote from the Gothic as from the classical world. Like

them, as was every fine work of that age, it is the embodiment of a

single idea, of a personal sense of beauty of some creative genius;

and thus it stands apart in the history of house-building in

Europe, a cinque-cento conception in an English Gothic frame....

The house, too, has had the singular fortune to retain, at least on

the outside, its original form, and to be quite free from later

additions. Save that one side of the court has been removed, the

principal quadrangle, as seen from within, is in every essential

feature exactly as the builder left it. Nor, except by the removal

or the renewal of some mullions, has the exterior on any side

suffered any material change. It is not, like so many of our

ancient mansions, a record of the caprice, the ambition, the decay

or the bad taste, of successive generations. No Elizabethan

architect has added a classical porch; no Jacobean magnate has

thrown out a ponderous wing with fantastic gables and profusion of

scrolls; no Georgian squire has turned it into a miniature

Blenheim, or consulted his comfort by adding a square barrack....

This unity and peace, which seem to rest on the old house almost as

on a ruin or a cloister whence modern improvements are shut out,

are doubtless due to this: that from its building till to-day the

place has remained in the same family, and that a family debarred

by adherence to the ancient faith from taking active part in the

world of affairs.

The Wey's next turn is round the village of Send, where its navigable

branch makes eastward, while vagrant channels stray off a little north

to touch Woking. This name may seem familiar to London travellers, yet

few of them will know where and what Woking is. The lively new town that

has grown up so fast on the heaths about Woking Junction, stands nearly

two miles north of the original village, huddled about the tower and

tiled roof of its old church, a landmark conspicuous over the river

flat. Even when Defoe made his tour, this place lay "so out of all Road,

that 'tis very little heard of in England; it claims however some Honour

from its being once the Residence of ... the old Countess of Richmond,

Mother to King Henry VII., who made her last Retreat here," and who, he

might have added, had the singular fortune of being thrice a bride in

her teens. The moated royal manor has long disappeared; but this

back-water village preserves a Market Hall as token of former dignity.

When the branches of the Wey unite about a mile east of Old Woking, it

is only to split up again in vagrant loops, tangled by the taking in of

a tributary from the commons near Aldershot. The knot of tortuous

channels here encloses one of Surrey's rare ruins, the remains of

Newark Priory, of which the south transept walls still stand in broken

state, impressive rather than imposing, to be a favourite rendezvous of

picnic parties. Near the ruins a large old timber mill makes another

landmark of these watery meadows, overlooked from the north by a bank

bearing up the little church of Pyrford, with its faded wall paintings

and like hints of antiquity.

Lying some two or three miles by sandy roads from Woking or from Byfleet

stations, Newark is perhaps oftener visited by way of Ripley, a mile to

the south, a pleasant village about a spacious green, where the "Talbot"

and the "Anchor" have taken a new lease through the favour of cyclists.

With this fraternity the Ripley road came to be a so frequent spin, that

the Vicar, willing to run with the times, opened a free stable for

cycles at his parsonage, and set apart special seats for their riders,

who have repaid such hospitality by contributing a memorial window.

Another hostelry, frequented by golfers, is the "Hautboy" of Ockham,

birthplace of the scholastic theologian of that ilk. This oakland

village is separated from Ripley by Ockham Park, a demesne of Earl

Lovelace, Byron's grandson, who has another seat not far off at East

Horsley, where its Clock Tower may be seen standing up in the woods

along the south side of the Downs, that since we left Guildford have

been drawing away from the course of the river.

Following the Wey from Newark Priory, again we find its industrious and

its idle channels at cross purposes with each other, the latter making

one particularly extravagant bend eastward, so as to infect with its own

devious character the roads that must tack towards bridges. At the

Anchor Lock, and its quaint old inn, one might turn off to the right,

across a feeble branch, for the little church of Wisley, and by it push

on to Wisley Common, with its fir-girdled lakelet on the Ripley road,

and its "Hut" hostelry, a combination of a snug hotel and of a "Trust"

model public-house. Beside this road, on the west edge of the common, a

board shows the way among pine woods to a new feature of the Wey valley,

the Horticultural Society's Gardens, transplanted from Turnham Green,

already a sight worth seeing, but not open without an order from a

Fellow. The nearest stations are Effingham and Horsley, each about three

miles off to the south-east; and over the common the high-road leads on

in a couple of miles to Street Cobham, near which the Mole comes within

a mile or so of the Wey.

Striking off from the Wey Navigation on the other side, for instance by

a footpath from a bridge half a mile beyond the Anchor Lock, one could

soon reach Byfleet station on the main line, beyond which are the golf

links of New Zealand and the woods of Anningsley. Now the straggling

river waters the scattered hamlets of Byfleet, in which parish Henry

VIII. is said to have been nursed at Byfleet Park. The main village,

half an hour's walk from the station, lies below the wooded ridge of St.

George's Hill, that now stands up to the right as a last stronghold of

the heaths and pines of Surrey on the edge of the Thames valley.

Here the Wey Navigation seems to swerve needlessly to the left, meeting

the branch with which it makes a junction beside the railway line. This

branch is the Basingstoke Canal, of late years fallen into disuse, and

in parts almost dried up, or choked with weeds; but there have been

rumours of its being restored to activity. The tow-path of the united

canal gives hence a plain walk to Weybridge, safe from the "Gadarene

grunt" of the motor-car. The old channel takes an extremely crooked

course nearer the flank of St. George's Hill, which at its southern end

one might mount to pass through the private grounds as the pleasantest

path to Weybridge station, a mile beyond which the Wey makes its last

twist into the Thames. Thus ends a river that has led us through the

heart of Surrey, itself a goodly stream, and often decked out in such

rich green attire as would beautify the most frumpish canal.

IV

UP THE MOLE

The second river of Surrey is the Mole, a more untamed stream than the

Wey, not harnessed to any occupation unless angling and pleasure-boating

by stretches, or here and there the turning of a mill. The name has been

taken for a little joke of our ancestors, as denoting the way in which

at one part of its course this river tries a trick of burrowing in hot

seasons--

That, like a nousling Mole, doth make

His way still underground, till Thames he overtake.

But it seems doubtful whether the name of this retiring animal be as old

in English as that of Molesey, the Mole island, where the river enters

the Thames at what is now rather a chain of shady islands, a noted port

of pleasure-boats; and the name Tagg, that has taken such banyan-like

root here, seems also to have a smack of Saxon origin. The Emlyn is the

Mole's old _alias_, which has been connected with a Celtic word for

"mill"; and when we compare the Latin _Mola_ and _Molina_ a more

probable origin of the name may be suggested. But such a derivation also

is scouted by one of the chief pundits of English etymology, who guesses

rather that "Mole has been manufactured by backward inferences out of

Molesey, and that this contains the genitive of a personal

name"--perhaps some Tagg of primitive days.

To its obscure name poets have added such epithets as the "sullen" Mole,

the "soft and gentle" Mole, and the "silent" Mole. The "sulky" Mole

sometimes suggests itself; and the "wild" Mole would be not out of place

in flood time. In its upper course it has ripples and rushes; and as it

pushes through the chalk it may give itself up to the freaks of its

"swallows"; but in general this "wanton nymph" takes a rather tame

career on a flat arena, showing its friskiness chiefly by curving turns,

or by cascades too neat to be natural; often, too, it varies its mood

between weedy shallows and curdling pools; now it seems to sleep under a

crumbling meadow bank; now it tries a run beneath a wooded slope, or

steals out of a vault of trees to be half-buried in "weeds of glorious

[Illustration: WATER LANE, NEAR EAST HORSLEY.]

feature"; then at last it creeps slowly over the Thames plain, like an

idle scholar who knows what tasks await the end of its holiday

independence. In the final mile or two it makes an attempt at a delta of

two branches, that to the right styled the Ember river.